72o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



weak themselves and need protection; they call the healthy egoism of 

 the lords bad because the lords push them so hard. Their morality is 

 the morality of gregarious animals, H eerdentiermoral, it is the moral- 

 ity of the timid, weak and sick; their virtues are the virtues of the 

 herd, and these are praised because they preserve the herd. 



But all that is perverse; the traditional pity-morality is a degen- 

 eracy. Life, the affirmation of life, the exercise of healthy robust 

 instincts, is good. Life, more life, intenser, fuller life, is the demand. 

 This is clearly brought out in the relations which the states assume to 

 one another; societies do not follow the pity-morality in their treat- 

 ment of other societies, they are not altruistic towards each other. The 

 study of society is so valuable because man as society is much more 

 naive than man as individual. Society has never looked upon virtue 

 as anything but a means of power, strength and order. Outwardly, in 

 its dealings with other collective bodies, the herd is hostile, selfish, 

 merciless, greedy for rule, full of distrust. 



The lord, or strong man, the aristocrat, feels that life is good, and 

 calls everything that makes for his ideal good. He and his equals, the 

 robust natures, are good; their self-assertion, their self-glorification, 

 their love of life, their will for power, their desire for struggle, that is 

 good. The strong and noble despise the weaklings, the slaves; these 

 are sclileclit, low, base, plebeian, vulgar. The very word schlecht means 

 low, base, common, of low descent, despicable. It expresses certain in- 

 capacities which are physiologically connected with the type of degen- 

 eracy : e. g., weakness of will, vacillation, inability to check the reaction 

 to a stimulus and to control oneself, lack of freedom in the presence of 

 any kind of suggestion on the part of another's will. Fear, cowardice, 

 flattery, baseness, humility, mendacity and weakness are the qualities 

 of the base-born. 



Whatever tends to preserve and develop the robust men, the great 

 individuals, the higher type, is good, whatever tends to hinder the 

 realization of this end is bad. The qualities which make for the preser- 

 vation of the good type are good, whatever acts and qualities tend to 

 keep the stock pure are right. Hence the lords have no duties to their 

 inferiors, but only to their equals. Indeed, the massess are merely so 

 much food for the geniuses, the necessary background and instrument 

 for the higher types. They do not count. The aristocrat fixes the 

 values, and he values himself alone. 



It is not correct to say that Neitzsche is a moral nihilist, that he 

 repudiates all morality. He does repudiate the traditional morality, 

 but sets up in its stead a new morality, the Herrenmoral, which, as he 

 believes, is the morality of health and power, the original morality, 

 which was displaced by the slave-morality, a heritage of the Jews. 

 Indeed, the main thing for him after all is the principle that should 

 underlie all morality, the principle of the higher type. " I do not 



